This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

With all of New England now allowing gays to marry, surely fearful conservatives worry that the cancer is spreading  not just down the East Coast to New York, Delaware and Maryland, but it's popping up everywhere, in Iowa, Washington, even Minnesota. Soon in Oregon and California (regardless how the Supreme Court rules on California's Proposition 8).

Surely, we're approaching some tipping point when the rest of the country must allow all adult Americans to marry whom they love. America's been down the state-by-state reform road before, with slavery, women's suffrage, Jim Crow laws and interracial marriage. In the end, it becomes a nationwide policy.

So, too, with same-sex marriage: America cannot forever be a house divided. And when that day of jubilation comes, when gay wedding bells ring from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, what then?

Well … nothing. Nothing remarkable.

Gay couples will marry and live out their everyday lives, and everyone else will, too. No more drama. No one any more will pay attention to the 2 percent of the population who marry their same sex.

What a controversial quest and achievement: to be treated just like everyone else.